GE Healthcare CEO John Flannery says the company will double its workforce of 5,000 software engineers within the next several years as part of a previously announced broader plan to invest $500 million in software talent and development. Flannery says the engineers will most likely be put to work making the company’s Predix industrial cloud platform more medical-app friendly. He added that, “We’ll be hiring software engineers, data analysts, imaging analysts, to develop our own apps, but also to develop the platform and the capability of the platform to host hundreds of other applications.”

Entrada adds enterprise mobile scribing capabilities to its physician documentation solution, giving physicians EHR-friendly options based on their note-taking preference in one solution.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HIE image-exchange and clinical referral technology vendor EHealth Technologies will invest $310,000 in expanding its headquarters in West Henrietta, NY by nearly 12,000 square feet. It also plans to hire an additional 84 staffers over the next three years.

Telemedicine

Salus Telehealth partners with Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors to offer military family members virtual grief counseling at no cost.

Austin Regional Clinic (TX) partners with local telemedicine company EMD Access to launch virtual urgent-care consult services in May. It is in the process of developing a similar offering for patients with chronic conditions. ARC, which has 20 locations, seems to be on a bit of a health IT buying spree: It added evidence-based clinical guideline support from Wolters Kluwer to its Epic HER earlier this month.

People

Richard Moran (Menlo College) joins VideoKall’s Board of Directors. The Potomac, MD-based company is preparing to launch a line of virtual consult kiosks that seem similar in scope to HealthSpot, which, as readers may recall, sold its assets to Rite-Aid for $1.5 million after shutting down for unspecified reasons last summer. None of the company’s three presumably full-time employees ties to healthcare, which makes me wonder how well the company will fare.

Government and Politics

My “Government Faves” Twitter list has been relatively quiet since the Trump Administration took over (with the exception of one former CMS staffer.) Eight tweets in, CMS Administrator Seema Verma seems to be getting the hang of the social media tool.

Sponsor Updates

CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at CLMA KnowledgeLab 2017 March 26-29 in Nashville.